All Choice No Consequence: Efficiently Branching Narrative
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- čas přidán 11. 12. 2019
- In this 2016 GDC talk, Pocket Gems' Cassie Phillipps offers a crash course on how to create meaningful story branches without making narratives that are convoluted, confusing or shallow.
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Hey y'all - this is clearly a presentation based off experience with a specific kind of game. And although the speaker does seem to be conflating their specific kind of game with _all_ games, y'all don't have to talk-down the advice _entirely._ It has some widely-useful takeaways: The feeling of choice is very important - an important choice that 90% of players don't realize was important at all is essentially wasted resources, regardless of genre
Man, I understand why it's necessary to skip out on serious consequences for decisions, but the artist in me wants to write/read a narrative filled to the brim with choices that have major impact and consequence. I think the reader/audience can tell when you're faking them out. I've been so grateful to games that actually gave me consequences, but I feel so jipped when a game offers me a choice that I deliberate over for a long time and then it just says "whoops! Looks like it worked out the way the devs needed it to anyway!" It makes me want to stop playing the game when this happens.
The tough thing is that this is the real world. There are time constraints, budget constraints. It's just a shame we so rarely get to see games go completely wild with branching narratives.
I agree. Though, I don't know why it would have to be so many, many branches. Enough is as good as a feast. I feel as if it's a cop out to say it's too costly to give players real choices because it will cost too much time and money.
I really long for those games where my choices matter. Maybe someday someone will code/write them and it will become the norm rather than the exception.
Recommend looking up talks by Jon Ingold from Inkle. He loves the idea of being able to make truly unique branching narratives… so he makes text games. Or text games with a graphic illustration interface over a text game. It’s honestly the only way to do truly satisfying branching narrative unless you’re willing to pay a studio of hundreds to work for years on content most players will never experience. And guess what, large gaming corporations who make the decisions aren’t often excited about paying hundreds (or thousands) of employees and contractors, to produce content that will mostly not be seen by an individual player.
In my experience, the players complaining about lack of choice in games aren’t interested in playing the games that truly implement it. (Example: games by Inkle or Choice of Games)
I think if you've noticed it, it means they've failed as developers.
I think we have to remember that ALL OF GAME DESIGN is on some level **tricking the player into believing something that is not real.** (same with movies too)
Right behind the pixel-thin walls of literally every perfectly constructed, beautiful, immersive, impactful video game world -- there's a fake skybox floating over an infinite default plane. I once cried playing Mass Effect sitting there with Liara Tsoni watching the universe end. But if I had just managed to clip my character's head into hers I would've seen her teeth and eyeballs floating in space.
I fully agree. All choice no consequence seems to be just an excuse for development laziness. Hopefully new technologies like AI will allow us to have more consequence depending on our choices than ever, so much so that only imagination will be the limit.
It’s interesting to hear people say keeping choices in line with the story is a bad thing, then say so many bad things when stories make no sense based on making countless choices. It becomes a beast of a narrative and almost impossible to control when you give too many “deep” choices. Imagine the insane branching from a simple NPC interaction that determines if you become king of a castle or a piece of toast on an alien dinner plate. Huh? Exactly…
That last sentence is what a game based on Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy would be
I get people don't like being told they are dumb. But that doesn't make her wrong. Interesting talk that reminds us about the practical consequences and the underlying principles of the design choices we make. Thank you
Fantastic talk! I know some people might be hung up about 'feeling like they matter' portion, but many triple-A industry games (including universally celebrated ones) are laid out in this fashion. At the end of the day, people respond to emotion and reactivity more than they respond to JUST content- and I enjoyed the more business-minded presentation. Many talks focus on the design and the narrative but games (for most people) is a product and every single quality product on the market is heavily based in research and data. To ignore this reality removes a very powerful tool from the arsenal as a game designer.
Indeed! It's funny to see people complain about her points even though J Sawyer's description of how New Vegas was written is basically the same idea. We can all guess why people would react to these two so differently.
Woah... reading the comments ...quite a few people seem hung up about the "feel important" rather than "be important" part of the talk. Look, its not that deep.
Phillipps never says that the choices should be inconsequential. Just, that it is more important for the player experience to make choices that "feel important".
Which you just can't deny. Phillipps is absolutely right: If a choice is super important but doesn't feel that way to the player it is still a bad! Choice.
And it won't be enjoyable to play.
If there is enough time for everything, that's obviously great, but most often there is a looming deadline and one gets sidetracked by branches and sidequests and convuluted storylines. I found her talk to be very informative and helpful.
PS: Some of the comments I read were pretty messed up. So just to clarify:
- A targeted demographic of young women is valid. A game is not superior just because it targets young men.
- A game is also not automatically inferior just because it is played on mobile. That is a matter of taste and goals.
- Her gender does not negate her experience and success in her field. Take her advice or leave it, but do not make it about her gender.
good comment, especially the PS. thanks for tha input :)
Way too late for the party, but thanks for this comment. As soon as she said she worked for 'episode', I had my prejudices about their games and demographic color her advice a bit for me as 'take it with a grain of salt'.
But that's messed up. We need to catch ourselves when this happens, cause as you said, the data is still valuable and the games and demographic should be respected. And, even if the data is limited to this scope, what it shows still rings true for pc games with a wider demographic like telltale, as she mentions. They use many of the same principles.
I think it just goes with the wider social issue of looking down on everything that young women enjoy, and as a game dev and woman, I feel like I need to be able to break that habit, and look at all types of games and all types of demographics with equal interest and respect, even if I, as a gamer, have my own preferences and tastes. You reminded me of that. So thanks. :)
Except that it kind of feels as if that's exactly what she's saying. "Having choices that ARE impactful is irrelavent." The opposite of impactful is inconsequential. When I play games I don't need to "be important" but I do want to direct my gameplay and have the game be a meaningful use of my time and be fun.
And I'm not saying that her talk wasn't useful. I'm sure it was and is. At the very least, it shows where the gaming industry is at. At best, it shows what's missing and an important niche that's available to be filled.
The point here seems to not be that consequences don't matter but that consequences should be subtle.
nope
The consequences should not be really seen from a mile off. Each step your player makes, the future should be seen as shrouded until after the fact. THATS the impact, regardless of the colour of emotion.
Say, as a negative consequence, your character has to choose between lovers - one staying home from war, the other going to fight on the frontlines. On the surface, the player would try and judge who the character would be the most happiest with, on another level they may sense what the future may be like - the one staying might have a steady job but the other has a career - but the deepest level is finding love during wartime. One staying could be seen as a coward, the one going to fight may be too much of an idealist and is essentially a dead man walking. The player subconsciously has to decide which loss can they endure the most.
Where I think Cass is coming from is that the CHOICE is the subtle aspect, not the consequence. I think a masterful piece of writing is one that makes the viewer/reader/player not even realise they’re making decisions UNTIL the consequences hit. Similar to a plot twist - it’s not one you DIDNT see coming. It’s one you should have.
What a great talk! You have a really effective demeanor on stage as well.
You can also focus on how a story can be told. A good example of this is probably Disco Elysium.
Why not adapting the atmosphere, the tone or the goals as the story unfolds? There are so many other things to try in storytelling!
Searching for an efficient formula on how to do things is probably the best way on how not making that game you dream about. I suppose it all depends on the primary objective.
Not a fan of speeches that give advice on what not to do. Seeking elegant solutions to seemingly insoluble problems is part of the joys of game dev.
Yeah, I get the impression that the goal was to demystify or deconstruct writing for interactive fiction versus choose your own adventure games. It's very easy to bloat things if you're new to the process, so it's nice that some effort is made to make guardrails.
Great research! Great talk based on the outcome of the research on games! Interesting and competent talk! Thank you!
I remember playing EI. I respect their pragmatic business model in outsourcing content creation but I don't much like their games. They feel incredibly linear.
This was EXCELLENT thank you so much!
She mentioned that it's crucial that the player *feel* their choices are important.
This can be done with meaningful choices or without, therefore she says one should avoid too many meaningful choices as they require more resources to implement.
What if one generated truly meaningful choices procedurally, relying on systemic design to derive the consequences of the choices? Then, I think truly meaningful choices could be done for a constant upfront cost.
This is what some roguelikes do, but it is typically very difficult to implement convincingly. I think the creator of Dwarven Fortress had a talk about how they design the quests/stories/villains for their game.
That wouldn't really work for games that convey their story through dialogue. You need someone to write the dialogue. The tech isn't there to automate that
That's why the next step of plot-driven games are rougelikes, and theyre growing in prominence today.
It's very difficult to have procedurally generated content feel anywhere near as compelling as something deliberately designed by a human being. Daggerfall vs. Morrowind is a classic case study for a series that switched from having a huge amount of procedural content to a much smaller amount of hand-made content and mostly benefitted from it.
With stuff like AI dungeon, we're just now beginning to move into an era of that sort of thing being possible for narrative, but AI dungeon as it currently exists cannot keep a situation straight for more than a few lines, let alone tell a satisfying overall story with themes and characters and any kind of meaning.
This is completely possible… If you’re in a table top game and the AI is a human brain.
this is such an underrated talk
I love all the comments saying "ackshually only mobiles games should be like this!" while ignoring that The Witcher, Mass Effect, Fallout, TES, and the vast majority of other mainstream successful RPGs follow this exact formula. Even The Witcher 2, which goes out of its way to split into two major branches that affect the whole story, still ultimately has Act 3 play out in the exact same location and in a very similar way, regardless of what you chose. But people hold that series up as an example of great choices, and it's mostly /because/ it does exactly the things laid out in this talk (i.e. a very strong core story, immediate responses to your choices, a focus on making the choices feel difficult and not just right vs wrong, little choices affecting how characters react to you in fairly small ways). Fallout New Vegas probably has the most choicest choice of any mainstream AAA non-CRPG I can think of, but you still always wind up going through the same core plot beats and ending the game with a fight at Hoover Dam, regardless of the faction you pick, and 99% of the choice is mostly inconsequential moment-to-moment dialogue stuff.
My god, I finally found a like-minded person who speaks the truth. Jesus, if you dare to say this stuff to fanboys belonging to any of the aforementioned games, they're gonna reap you to shreds.
I love you, my dude/dudette!
That's not quite true. While I'll admit I ended up disagreeing with this talk much less than I expected to based on the title, there are still some areas where the approach she recommends differs from what I prefer in games.
For example, at 16:00, she says that there should be immediate reactions to the player's choices, and that the consequences should be clear up front. However, one of the things that I love about The Witcher series is that it often deliberately conceals the full consequences of a choice until well after you've made it (and it's much too late to reload and pick a different option). That approach certainly has pitfalls, and The Witcher games don't always pull it off perfectly, but when they do, it can create some very impactful moments.
@@phlegios ahaha, nice mindset. Anybody that have the same thought like you - “spreading the truce”
Anybody who have other ideas - “fanboys”
Probably its really comfortable to discuss smith with you :)
@@LEOvsMAO My comment was specific to this GDC and how the person to whom I replied sees mentioned games as no different than what devs do with mobile games and other linearly designed games in general. I may have been hyperbolic in my reply, but, nonetheless, it is how things work in game design. Fanboys just don't want to acknowledge bad, lazy or outdated game design.
Most of those are notorious for being an inch deep and a mile wide, and not feeling like True rpgs among hard-core old school rpg fans. Just compar fallout 1 to fallout 4, it's a different world of choice and possibilities. Fallout 4 is an rpg in the same way ghost of tsushima is an rpg, in aesthetic, resource management, and leveling mechanics only
Amazing talk, thank you so much, presented super well too
As a game player, rather than a game writer/coder, the fact that branching makes players "feel" as if they have choices that matter makes me feal cheated in some way. This is probably why I've stayed away from games/stories where my choices don't seem to matter. I played games quite a while ago (played them many times over, in fact) where the choices I made really did make a difference to where the story went, how the game played out--those games provided me with some of the best gameplay I've ever had because my choices DID make a difference in the outcome of the game. I actively look for games where my choices really make a difference, not just seem to. Alas, there aren't games these days where choices really mattter. I wish the industry would move toward making player choices change the games/stories in meaninful ways. Because then the gameplay is more personal, much more fun, and much more replayable. I know the bottom line is time and money. I just wish the bottom line would be player enjoyment and investment in a game/story series. It certainly would keep me coming back for more (ie purchasing more games/stories which in turn would generate more money for the game companies). And, of course, that's just my opinion.
Even so, it was a very fascinating and enlightening talk--even if it only confirmed that as a player my choices in games really don't matter.
Have you played road 96?
Btw I personally think meaningless choices still add a lot to the game as long as they aren't "fake out" choices. She even mentioned in the talk not to do smth like giving a choice and then the chara does something else anyway. For me a great meaningless choice is stuff like being antagonistic or being friendly imo that immediately makes the story feel more personal even if it doesn't change anything
I definitely feel you on this, as I grew up on games with branching narratives. Now that I'm older, and I make games myself, I see how some of those games that I used to adore have *some* decisions that feel like they pay off, but the branching always recombines itself later. Even Fallout New Vegas, well celebrated for good branching narratives, is pretty economical with its branching. Most choices have immediate consequences, but don't exponentially branch down the line. You as a player can experience most of the quests and factions in a single run, and the choices you make in who to support and ally with don't lead to any significant branching, but still feel meaningful. And then the end credit slideshow is a great way to show consequence without needing to develop a large amount of extra scenes.
Game design is smoke and mirrors, and talks like this in GDC are meant to be practical. I especially appreciate the data -- games with a lot of branching don't always lead to players replaying it. That was interesting. Also, if you have too much branching, you have to split up storytelling time between each branch to make sure it all feels satisfying, which can water down a story. More branching seems to lead to development hurdles, while not contributing that much to the player experience. The illusion of branching, when done properly, seems like it's far more enjoyable for players too, who receive a more thought out narrative as well since dev resources aren't split on branches the player isn't going to see.
When a game branches, it needs to be effective and economical. Immediate repercussions and having choices acknowledged. The feeling of consequence (slide show endings, a variety of end states but no significant in-quest branching... maybe one or two branches at most). I haven't attempted a branching narrative myself, but this is what I learned from watching this and other similar talks and reflecting on games I've played.
Again, a lot of the games I felt had great choice and consequence seem to do exactly the above. They're just really good about hiding the mirrors. But this leads to stronger, more focused narratives that can deliver proper structure and pacing while still giving players a feeling of narrative freedom. Does it feel like cheating? I dunno. But then, there's a reason why you probably don't want to learn how a magic trick is done. If you break down any story or game, the magic can get lost as you see the practical side to how it was done.
The problem with players who *play* non-linear narratives is the fact that replay value actually doesn't matter to people. If you look at the data, the vast majority of players *don't* replay the game. There are simply too many games to play to keep replaying your non-linear narrative just to see things play out differently. Most players make the choices they would make, get to the end, feel satisfied (or not), and move onto the next game. Why spend so much time and resources building a game with so many branches if 90% of players will never experience most of them? *That's* why games like that are so incredibly rare. It takes a special kind of person to put *that* much time into a non-linear narrative game with that level of breadth. And by "special," I mean, "stupid," because they clearly have more money than they have sense. The data shows it's much better to make a *deep* but more linear game with only a *few* major branches, not a *super-wide* game where *every single choice* leads to an *entirely* different scenario; that's like writing six books and combining them into a single volume for sale! Anyone would tell you how stupid that is. Make it six books (games) instead.
DAMN THIS TALK WAS GENUINELY INCREDIBLE
THANK YOU SO MUCH, Imma use ALL of this in my semester project :}
Feels like its extremely important to consider the target audience of the games she uses as examples.
Also when she talks about branches she only talks about the "pointless branching", never about actual branching narrative.
And I don't know, isn't it common sense that a good linear story feels better than a mediocre one with pointless branching?
I've yet to play a game with ACTUAL fully realized branching. Only games with pointless branching and different endings.
And I agree branching is a huge risk when you're AAA game and each minute of dev costs you a bout a couple million dollars.
Can I introduce you to the 999 series?
I mean, it's technically linear, but yet it's also not.
@@yuirick just finished it, it was awesome
Yes branching often end up being pointless non-difference, but if you only have a few critical choice it's totally possible to developpe their concequences fully like if they were 3/4 linear branches. Look at Fire Emblem Three Houses for exemple, it has 4 actual different branches that allow you to replay it several times with an actually different story.
try ai somnium files
Full branching: The Witcher 2. You have one choice which gonna change pretty much everything you'll do in the next chapter. Some side quests will be the same, but beside of that, the main quest is completely different (locations, characters, cutscenes, dialogues, story). You can only understand all the plot by doing the game twice. And you have other choices after that too. I don't think any other game did that. Not even The Witcher 3 (which still has really meaningfull choices though, just like The Witcher 1).
Very cool! I'd be interested in hearing what steps you might take when designing narrative choices/branches when there is only one NPC in the entire game. :)
I've been playing with the notion of open world rpg games that don't have a main story line or mainquest. Do games like Skyrim need an overarching singular story? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of this being your character and your experience in the world? If you remember the first Fable, they make a big deal out of becoming the character you want to be yet the story had set points you had to hit, such as going to jail. That never sat right with me. I guess what I am asking is if having a story in an open game is actually hampering the openness of the experience.
I definitely think a game like Skyrim doesn't need a main story I mean for Skyrim specifically the main story is like the least memorable part of the game because most people just end up forgetting about it until they're 100hrs in
Though idk how to give the player the feeling of having completed the game without any end goal but maybe in a game like that the end goal could change depending on which quests you played and how you solved them?
@@Te3time I agree with you. I think that's a much cooler way to go about an open world game.
Well, in Sunless Sea/Skies, you actually pick your ultimate goal at the start of the game. Some of them are very simple, like getting a bunch of money and retiring, and others are more narratively involved, like finding the secret to immortality. It's a nice way of having an overarching goal, without feeling like the main story is getting in the way of the open-ended exploration of the world.
This was incredible. You may have single-handedly changed how we will be writing our narrative!
What.s the game name on thumbnail?
The "illusion of choice" is a useful tool, but overusing it is a treason to your audience. Making games should be a process that is respectful with the audience and its attention.
This lecture is useful for those overwhelmed by branching anyway. Let's just not flood the market with cheap money grabbing games
"felling" of choices without actually having one is the one flaw that destroys the game for me, that removes the replayability, the problem is that they count on people finishing their first run, i usualy start a new run before finishing a previous and that is why i discover the choice is fake and stop playing
Replayability is seen as the gospel in videogmaes but I disagree with it. With narrative games, players don't need to replay them, they need to feel involved.
That is why I love those games so much: I feel the master of the story AND I probably only have to play it once.
For "gamey" features, I guess you'd like Life is Strange 2 more maybe. One of my fave games of 2019.
@@ZoidbergForPresident replayability is not required, but take for example arkham city, to play the new game plus you MUST finish the game, by the point you can play the more interesting game mode, the story is boring because you are just repeating it, either give all game modes from the start, like outer world's or make the story change, like outer world's, I play for the game play, that is why o value repeatability, if the story will be on may way at least give the change to change it
@@ZoidbergForPresident Then why pretend you're giving the player a choice? No movie gives the viewer a choice, but a good movie is still involving.
The illusion of choice seems to me like a lazy way to pretend the player has agency, and it can be mighty unsatisfying to play once you find out there's nothing behind the curtain.
Make a linear narrative game if you like, or a systemic flexible narrative game if you want. I'd say it's pretty odious to make a linear story and pretend it's interactive.
@@oldvlognewtricks But what if it - with an explanation from the outset - is about adjusting details as you go rather than any large changes?
I say this with Telltale in mind as an example
@@BroudbrunMusicMerge If you like - this is not what the Telltale games do. They pretend you have agency when you have precious little.
I wager making it clear to the player from the outset that only minor changes are possible would puncture the illusion.
Consequences aren't necessarily negative.
So, they've gathered data from a very specific audience, which is mobile interactive* story players, and now presenting it as the ultimate truth "people don't want the consequences of their choices".
____________
* _interactive_ as in, there's buttons you have to press to advance through the mostly linear storyline.
Yeah, I bug at the word *Interactive* too. Doesn't sound very interactive to me either.
I mean I realize I'm a nobody commenting on a someone and I realize that I'm exaggerating and this is not exactly what she's saying but I have to say it...
This is basically a "How to make your game mediocre" talk. If you base all of your decisions on data interpreted hand-waveyly and sheer numbers instead of understanding the underlying dynamics, you're doomed to never fail horribly, never succeed incredibly, and always be "meh".
More seriously, though, the more serious flaw I see in this talk is that she is dismissing any attempt to actually do something riskier or less certain. The useful takeaway that I could extract (after a lot of work) from what she's saying is: How it feels is more important than what it actually is. That doesn't mean neither of these things that she does say: 1. That because most players don't replay the game, making the game replayable is a waste of time. 2. That because real choice is not as important as perceived choice, real choice is a waste of time.
All in all, by the way, she seems very happy with their data, but she's not realizing the blatant and obvious bias in that data: It's the data obtained from the users of games on a platform with precisely these design principles in mind. Of course people don't replay YOUR games, because you design them not to be replayable. I'm not saying they are doing it necessarily wrong, but they are trying to say anyone who is doing it differently is by definition doing it wrong, based on THEIR data. That is a most basic fallacy in reasoning. Her approach is incredibly short-term focused and statistics-focused, and she's not even doing that right.
I felt like she was only interested in economically creating the illusion of interaction without any artistic merit. Somewhat shameful that she placed her games in a list with Inkle, a studio that follows a completely different philosophy, of deliberately missing out, and which uses a more sophisticated way of accomplishing story-branching behind the scenes. Crawford talked about the fundamental problems of story-trees almost three decades ago and people still develop cheap interactive novels.
you can't fool me with choices that just feel like they matter.
But many people are
How would you know if you've been fooled?
@@jeffmorse6727 When you replay the game, for example ?
Consequence is what differentiates gaming narrative from other types of storytelling. While I understand that from a business point of view you want to reduce it, in fact I hope gaming gives us more real choice and consequence, especially considering how AI is becoming important and can allow for more possibilities.
Fallout 4.... player agency....
one of my favorites series is the way of samurai, it is so replayable that i finished the game 5 times in a single day, the allows you to take the sam challenges with different tools, i will not do that in a 100+ hours game like the recent fallout games
the take aways were good, but he start was really bad
Everything I hate about bad games is celebrated in this talk.
I hate this mindset. It creates empty shallow games with meaningless hollow choices and a story where your actions have no real consequences.
Try developing your own "truly" branching game where, due to unique branching, every scene has custom animation, graphics, NPCs, lighting, rigging, etc. It will take you and a staff of several hundred people a few years to do that… so you’ll need the budget for that… so you’ll need to convince finance executives that it’s a good idea to pay several hundred people for years, to make a game where 95% of the content won’t be experienced by the player. After you’ve done all that, come back and tell us what you think 😂
Check out Inkle’s games if you really care about true reactive/responsive narrative.
Yes but you can make a shorter game like undertale and the problem is solved.
@@xxTheDoggxxhave you tried it yourself?
@@homohomage1566 undertale tried it
I ‘m trying to use AI (machine learning) actors that act by themselves, interacting with the environment to satisfy a certain condition or goal. Right now I’m trying to finish developing the NLP framework for dynamically generated dialogues but other than that it works just fine.
This is the future of story in games, I hope.
that would be nice, just imagine something like fallout 1, but the npcs can actually talk about any matter
@SeriousName Machine learning is getting better all the time, hopefully it's not too many years away.
"Creating an AI that produces dialogue indistinguishable from a human" is literally the Turing test, a test for human intelligence level AI, so I kind of doubt you'll be able to accomplish what you're trying to do. "Make an AI that dynamically generates meaningful and relevant dialogue" is one of those things that doesn't sound that hard, but is actually virtually impossible.
@@jeffmorse6727 what is the point of your comment? to me it seems you're simply laughing at a developers aspiration. inkling is small and their "narrative sorcery" structure coupled with their script has created somwthing truly wonderful which they're sharing for free. honestly, what is your intention here?
Don't actually put content in your game, its not worth it. you can just fool your stupid consumers instead. Great message to future developers...
I am not an expert in video game industry, but I'm actually disappointed by this video. It does lack a part in the title "for mobile games", because as a player and a learning gamedev, I really doesn't feel gamers wanting fake choices and cheap narrative. At the end of this video, I felt click-baited, and it's the first time witch GDC :-/
This speech is about a bunch of specifics : type of game (narrative mobile games), economical model (cheap and fast to produce), and audience (casual gamers). This should have been announced. The statistic the lady is talking about are limited to one kind of all these specifics, and they should be presented so, not as a global truth about branching in a narrative game ...
There's a criminally omitted part in the title: "...in mobile games." Because anyone outside of that fast food market of meaningless, predatory, lowest effort entertainment will tear your game apart and despise and denounce you as a *game* developer if you sell illusion of choice as actual choice.
Good talk! :)
@@bitbleed Even if I would have said that just because she's a fellow female, what's wrong with that? There's so few of us in the industry, there's nothing wrong with support. I suggest you keep your negativity yourself, internet fellow.
BEHROZ MORADI That comment just makes you look like a bigoted moron.
@@DarkMatterVisible OK Feminist but you won't get laid this way
@@bitbleed Don't be sexist
@@bitbleed Don't be gross. You're saying they don't get laid at all by not being sexist, but you get laid a lot by being sexist?
Interesting topic, but not the best delivery and examples. Thank you!
It's looking like the GDC talks whose speakers work in the mobile industry are occasionally getting spammed with dislikes. The game industry already has WAY too much politics. We absolutely don't need MORE of that. ):
This is one depressing talk. Some of the most revered games of all times famously have different endings, such as Deus Ex. Then on the other end you have games like Mass Effect 3, which had exactly this illusion of story choice and was widely hated for it.
I'll say it out loud: Whether or not you get lost in your own branching narrative depends on your skill as game devs and writers. Others have managed it, why can't you?
One thing to wonder is differences in genre gameplay, platform, and even perceived value. Do people play interactive stories on an app similar to how they play an indie pc game or major console release? Is there audience overlap, or are these different groups, and do they play the games the same way? Do we value replay and story in a 5usd, 15usd, 50usd or free game differently? How does how 'fun' the rest of the gameplay feels affect a desire to replay.
That said, there's information here to make people think about just how important it is to consider how much interactivity your story really needs, and how you should approach it to not alienate the audience or increase cost pointlessly while increasing engagement.
Different ending would actually be relatively cheap. It is at most different flow of last act, which would be still set in the same place for all endings. At minimum it is just multiple cinematics. Whatever actions, dialogues etc that lead to each ending would be available anyway.
Any good RPG with restrictive stats is far more "interactive narrative" then titles listed at the beginning of the talk. Not only players usually have impact on main story, even more on side quests but some doors are closed or open from the beginning because of initial choice of stats. Fallout 1 or 2 may always have the same finale but what happened to many people and cities during the game is real choices. Tyranny had similar thing not by stats (you can level them up so far that is not really much of restriction) but by literally presenting player with choices in prologue, then encountering results of these later in game. Of course none of that is mobile fare where attention span is limited to 2 screens, those games demand 10+ hours of attention from the player.
i think the problem with ME3 wasn't the illusion of choice, but just that it wasn't a particularly good ending to the story or designed well. Also the final scenes break with a bunch of the suggestions made in the talk if I remember them correctly.
@@Peteruspl chrono trigger has many endings, some of them relying on side quests, and you can actually kill one of the main characters and doing so removes a curse from another character, or you can keep the curse and get a new character
Peteruspl Anyone who says branching choices is easy knows nothing about game development, at all.
And if you are a game developer, then find an alternate job path, because this one ain’t gonna work out.
So, you have a disagreement over a kiss scene, add a path where it happens and one where it doesn't, only for the choice turn out to not be relevant at all since a fight is going to happen later anyway and the kiss scene in no way alters it.
And you're doing a GDC talk on choices and branching narratives...
Its more eficient that way? sure, but it bums everyone out.
How to cheaply mass produce story based games for adolescent girls.
Summary of this talk: "I have no standards. And why bust your ass striving for more?"
This is a tutorial of what not to do
fortunately telltale games has gone bankrupt since this talk
Ironically, the games they made with the most meaningful choices ended up selling the worst
@@BroudbrunMusicMerge I don't play any of their games but I'd be curious to find out whether those with the most meaniful choices were made after the games that were made without "wasting time on meaningful choices."
"You should no design for replays". Good luck with that, I'm out.
rename to "best practices for 0815 throwaway games"
There's a reason mobile "games" are ridiculed by pretty much everyone outside of the mobile market, and this talk just enhances that even more.
Not a single person in their right mind would consider half of what she said even remotely correct for REAL games.
Imagine if developers followed her advice before making Last Of Us or Horizon Zero Dawn or God of War or Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age Origins or Witcher 3 or any of the actual real masterpieces.
This talk needs a huge disclaimer that says "FOR MOBILE GAMES"
I'm out.
You didn't highlight a single thing of what she said and explained why it was wrong when applied to real games though. You just vaguely told us you think it's wrong all the while resorting to a logical fallacy. That's not very convincing.
none of the six console games you brought up have meaningful consequences to interesting decisions. e.g. Witcher 3 does a lot of things she talks about.
@@alexscriabin except for the part where you can lose whole characters
27 gamerdudes are crying the usual emo tears that games they don't care about exist. Indeed, how terrible: There are games not appealing to butthurt gamerdudes. Horror! It's a crime against humanity!
Perpahs us gamer dudes don't like politically motivated purple haired feminazis coming to GDC and talking about the current retardation trend that is also known as "Mobile gaming" while having no idea what actual story branching is .
BEHROZ MORADI Nothing in this talk was politically motivated.
You’re projecting. Just because you see the world through a twisted political lens doesn’t mean everything you see is actually politically motivated.
Stop being a loser incel.
A lot of people talking about politics in the comments. I watched the whole video. Didn't see any politics. What am I missing?
@@camille-jeanhelou4444 You're not missing anything, people extracted the "political" part out of their own "between the lines" read.
"The data shows" not 2 minutes in and I already can't stand her.
It's sad. There are no more artists in the game industry
Jesus, this women is so bethesdian. Exactly what's wrong with the industry. This is why Mass Effect: Andromeda was horrible. If you do the opposite of what she's saying and just ignore her, you'll end up with a Fallout: New Vegas, and trust me, that's much much better. Shame on this woman honestly. At 17:52 a good game would still have a fourth option of not doing anything and the plot could still move forward. This type of nonsense this woman keeps spouting is what lead to essential NPCs. 19:18 she's right about that though. Mass Effects number 1 issue